Quote

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1918
Born: December 11
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Historian
Militant
Military Personnel
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Life
Terrible
Legal
Either
Scale
Quite
Objectives
Law
Scales
Society
Lawyer
Regime
Tell
Worthy
Regimes
Without
Spent
Objective
Men
Indeed
Communist

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Image
It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A human being is all hope and impatience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
There are defendants whom the judges are afraid of.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
... that maxim of Descartes: Question everything! Question everything!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
The October Revolution is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn